Solar Roof Orbs Channel Sunlight, Scare Your Neighbors

Solar roof orbs on one Tokyo home show off the owners' environmentally friendly credentials while adding a dash of alien weirdness to the neighborhood. The orbs work much like those solar light tubes you'll see advertised in magazines, catching and transmitting sunlight deep into the dark recesses of one's home or office.

This video shows how the weird solar roof orbs work:

The odd alien orbs raise more questions than they answer. For one, if the orbs are basically just skylights, what do the homeowners do on cloudy or rainy days, not to mention nights?

Also, though the orbs appear to have some sort of metallic hardware inside them, it's not certain that they contain photoelectric cells that create power from sunlight. Hopefully that's the case - it would help reduce the initial purchase & installation expense by gradually feeding power back into the Tokyo metropolitan electric grid.

Then again, the orbs might not just look alien, they might BE alien... in which case there's really nothing to see here, move along, and remember the white zone is for loading and unloading only. (via Crunchgear and Japan Probe)